Book Review: 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia'

With its second-person point of view and its nearly cradle-to-grave arc, reading Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" is like being deeply immersed in a text-based role-playing game - only it's the kind of game Leo Tolstoy might have written, clear-eyed in its dissection of human folly, ambition and love.

Hamid, also the author of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," casts this novel as a self-help book, speaking directly to an unnamed boy, then man, who wants to get rich in an unnamed country, presumably Hamid's native Pakistan. In doing so he satirizes both the self-help genre and the rags-to-riches tales coming out of contemporary Asia, suggesting that such fortunes, like those of many of America's great robber barons, were built on crimes, opportunism and the occasional well-placed bribe:

" . . . Harnessing the state's might for personal gain is a much more sensible approach. Two related categories of actor have long understood this. Bureaucrats, who wear state uniforms while secretly backing their private interests. And bankers, who wear private uniforms while secretly being backed by the state. You will need the help of both. But in rising Asia, where bureaucrats lead, bankers tend to follow, and so it is on befriending the right bureaucrat that your continued success critically depends."

"How to Get Filthy Rich" would be an interesting literary novelty if it were only a satire, but Hamid does much more here. In his succinct, deft prose and episodic chapters, he unfolds the life stories of the man and his true love, also unnamed but described as "the pretty girl." Fueled by their ambitions, they are not destined to marry each other, but their connection lasts through their lifetimes. Beyond their determination, she has only her looks and he only his intelligence, but both do achieve a state of being "filthy rich," at least for a time.

The man goes from country urchin to city boy, teenage deliverer of pirated DVDs, impoverished college student (buttressed by an idealist, possibly Islamist, group that he joins temporarily), young salesman for a dealer in expired-label canned goods whose labels have been altered, bottled-water vendor (selling boiled tap water in reused bottles) and water company magnate.

He'll cut a corner or break a law, but he has standards, if only for the sake of business. On a day when a shortage of natural gas curtails the rebottling operation, his assistant suggests skipping the step of boiling the filthy tap water. " 'No. We don't boil, we don't sell.' You know quality matters, especially for fakes. Shops would stop buying if their customers began falling sick."

The pretty girl moves from salon assistant to model to actress to cooking-show star to furnishings boutique owner. She never marries but has lovers, including the occasional encounter with the man. He marries, not completely happily, and has a son.

Hamid's narrator peeks behind every facade of respectability in the man's life and others. The narrator notes that some of the advantages that make the man's success possible come from luck or chance:

"In your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of your three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree."

But I don't read the narrator's remarks as condemnation of the man. He sees clearly, in Tolstoyan fashion, but does not judge. If the man did not, like a conglomerate or a shark, keep pushing forward, what would happen to him? He'd likely sink back into the grinding semi-poverty of his sister and brother. The man loves, however imperfectly, his parents, siblings, wife and son as well as the pretty girl. He endures and escapes violence, both random and personal. He faces reverses with equanimity.

As an old man, he plays cards with the pretty girl:

"Her own eyes take in your posture, the inflection with which you lower the ashtray to the sofa. You are a gifted bluffer, inscrutable, as steady with a bad hand as with a bountiful one. It is your strength."